Digital economy, spatial spillover and carbon intensity: concurrently on the threshold effect of human capital

Abstract

Under the new development pattern, green low-carbon and digital economy become two mainstream development directions in China. Against the background ‘dual carbon’ strategies, based on the data of China between 2010 and 2018 at the city level, The paper adopts dynamic spatial Durbin models to investigate the causal links causal between digital economy and carbon intensity by constructing different spatial weight matrices, and explore the influence of human capital with threshold model. Results show that：(1) Urban digital economy and carbon intensity show significant positive spatial correlation characteristics. The carbon reduction of digital economy has obvious spatial spillover effect under different spatial weight matrices. (2) Industrial structure upgrading, technological innovation and resource allocation optimization are effective channels through which digital economy contributes to carbon emission reduction. (3) A double-threshold effect of human capital is evident in the carbon reduction of digital economy. The findings offer new perspectives and empirical evidence for understanding the causality relation between the digital economy and carbon emission, and those conclusions have important policy implications for how to promote the digital economy development and thus achieve the ‘double carbon goal’.